“The intelligence of that creature known as a crowd is the square root of the number of people in it.”

GNU PTERRY

Some great stuff here, thanks for the recommendation!

Great idea, gotta look into those and see if I can find smth fitting, thank you!

Thank you for the tips, will check those out!

Played in a very fun 2E Kingmaker game. Which was mostly dealing with the death of a character last session and some other roleplay things.

Also GMed more of my Traveller game; a great Pirates of Drinax campaign. Also ran the first session of our Call of Cthulhu “Horror on the Orient Express” campaign; which everybody survived, always a nice start to a CoC game. Plus, the 14 year old street urchin shooting down a zombie was great fun.

My group just had to retreat in our last 2E session yesterday. Got ambushed at night, horrible player rolls, plus our GM rolled max damage 90% of the time. After two rounds we had to run and leave the fighter to die to avoid a TPK.

For a quick one-shot to test out the system, most of my players will just skim the rules, and that’ll be enough. But if I run a long-term campaign I expect my players to have a basic grasp of the rules, but most importantly know how their characters rules works.

I will happily explain and help players get started. But if they ask me for 100th time which die to roll; don’t know how their character works; or similar basic things, I will get pissed at some point and ask them to please learn the game we’re playing.

You don’t need to know every single rule, but a basic grasp of them is just the bare minimum or I will kick them out of the game at some point. This hasn’t happened to me yet, all my players are very good at picking up new systems.

FLGS = Friendly locals game store

Some of these I have/am running as a GM, so it’s mostly “in what game do I want to be a player in”? Shadowrun, Traveller, Symbaroum, Rogue Trader, Warhammer Fantasy RPG, Cyberpunk RED and/or 2020, Star Trek Adventures

Valid opinion, I just never had the feeling with any of the system I enjoy. What would be an example in your view?

I love crunchy/complex systems! I GMed a lot of D&D 3.5; PF 1E; Cyberpunk; and some more. Especially having a big amount of choice in character creation is essential to me. I want my character to feel and play mechanically distinct from the other players. It’s one of the many reasons I despise 5E. Every Fighter I try to build plays exactly the same.

I can never get enough of new books, so that’s also more of a plus to me than anything else.

The length of the 2E Corebook is mostly due to it containing basically the PHB+GM Guide. It might look intimidating, but it’s really not as crunchy as it seems. So I really recommend trying to find a game in your LGS or online to join just to test out the system. Imo, Savage Worlds is a decent alternative to Pathfinder, even has a pathfinder setting. It’s a bit more rules-light as 2E but still offers good amounts of depth. Plus it is a setting agnostic system, so you can play Fantasy, Horror, SciFi, Cyberpunk, pretty much anything you can think of.

Normally I’m the forever GM and ran 2 and a bit 1E APs; but I’m playing in a Kingmaker game atm. We barely started and just leveled up to L2, but it’s already great fun. Last combat encounter, a small bandit camp, my Swashbuckler/Wrestler just had the most incredible luck and basically 1-hit killed everything he touched. Sentry up a tree? Just athletics up the tree and dropkick the bandits sternum through his spine. Another 3 bandits met similarly brutal demises.

You could give it some slashing/piercing resistance. But I’d argue that is too much. Hardness 7 will make destroying the thing already pretty difficult. And unless this happens during a combat encounter/ some kind of time crunch, it really doesn’t matter at all. It will just take longer. I wouldn’t even let the players make the rolls, just decide it takes X minutes and move on.